Monday, June 08, 2009

A Mystery For Hardened Hanna Barbera Nerds

Like me.These are from the earliest Yogi Sunday strips. Gene Hazelton is the artist known for doing the strip, but these panels don't look like his work to me. They are too unbalanced. They look like Tony Rivera - who did the layouts on most of the 1960 Yogi Bear TV cartoons.The real giveaway is the weird design of the Ranger -with the upturned pointy nose and the stiky outy pant cuffs.compare the above Ranger to this one below by Eisenberg:A much better drawing of the 1st standardized Ranger. (The Ranger in the first 2 seasons of Huckleberry Hound's Yogi segment always looked completely different in each cartoon)Yogi and BooBoo are also very unbalanced looking - just like the 1960 TV layouts.But then here is a kid and a Mom that look like Gene Hazelton designs - along with stiff bears, and Yogi with man hands.

The most obvious thing that comes to mind for me, is that he educated himself and practiced and practiced. Or that Tony fellow was allowed to draw faces as an assistant. those are the only two things I can think of for lack of knowledge.

Since I have most of them from the start I will continue scanning to see if there is a point when the strip gets standerized. There is a point about one year into the Flinstone strip it seems to me another artist appears there too. I find these things of extreme importance too, right after global warming, the Isreal/Palestine situation and the question what to have for dinner tonight. In fcat, I have solved the last two with my wife yesterday. No scrap that, that was just the last one. My wife did have a solution for the Isreal/Palestine situation, but the local supermarket was all out of the necessary ingredients.

Hi John Maybe they used a staff inker at the studio at the time over some rough pencils because the artist got suddenly sick.could you please tell us the inking tools they used back at the start of the early days at Hanna Barbera up intil they started to xerox the cells ,was it brush work or some ink pen or a special marker , to me it looks like some type of nib pen that they used because of the way the lines turn quickly and it would of been an easier tool to use for the inkers without having to train them to use brushes as they take more skill to use and i doubt h&b would of shelled out too much for skilled inkers back then due to budget

From Comic Creator:Karran Eccles Wright, or Kay Wright for short, was an artist at Dell/Gold Key from the 1960s to the 1980s. After a career in the animation field, he began doing funny animal comics for this publishing house in 1961. Among his many Disney credits are numerous stories in both the 'Duck' and the 'Mouse' universes. He inked Al Taliaferro's 'Donald Duck' daily in 1965. His other Dell credits include 'Woody Woodpecker', 'Yogi Bear', 'Snagglepuss', 'Snooper & Blabber', 'Huckleberry Hound' and the 'Flintstones'. Kay Wright has also done funny animal comics for DC (1947-1954). He passed away in 1999.